Here we go, after years of trying to use AI to do something useful, and ending up using it to convert excel files to JSON, because everything else was too complex, Gemini 3 Pro finally passed the “fun tool” test.
Of course, most of the times it produces code that gives me dyspnea just by looking at it, but at least it somehow kinda works-ish. And this is good.
What I Needed
I was creating a simple idle music loop for a game I was developing, and I wanted to include a Shepard tone (an infinite loop that creates the illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend).
I tried recreating it with my DAW (Cubase 14) with underwhelming results, and I also tried some online generators, but none of them allowed me to set a “loop length”.
Since I’m an experienced developer, I knew it could be easily done with some programming, but I also knew it was just above the “super easy, it’s gonna take 5 minutes” mark.
So I decided to give a shot at Gemini, and I was very pleased.
What I Got
What I got is exactly what I asked.
- I gave Gemini a rough description of what I wanted
- I made it generate a nice, detailed software specification.
- I switched to canvas mode and sent the specification as a prompt
- I added Angular’s best practices prompt for Gemini (the one generated by Angular CLI since version 21)
And after a few seconds I had an almost-working piece of software that did almost-exactly what I asked.
At this point, a tedious back and forth of error fixing, debugging and improvements went on for a few hours, until I was satisfied with what I had. And this is good.
Why is this good?
Because I have years of experience as a developer, I know how complex things are, I don’t underestimate, I overestimate, because I know it’s better to expect the unexpected.
And that creates a tremendous inertia.
Even a simple idea takes time and effort, probably a lot of boilerplate code that you’ve written thousands of time, responsive design, frameworks, infrastructure, ui, ux, error handling, libraries, updates, that piece of code you’ve written in 2016 that you still need in every project, and many, many, many more things.
The enthusiasm is already gone… “I’ll do it someday“… and you never do.
But now you can see your idea implemented and working in a matter of minutes, and all you have to do is explain what you want. You can see it, use it, and make informed decisions.
Like this one, I “made” it, I used it, and I thought “F**k, I gotta publish it now…“.
And I did, happily, because there was no more inertia.